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We interrupt this program (“ISMAR ’08) to bring you this breaking news from the Austin Game Developer Conference (via Gamasutra): Futurist and author Bruce Sterling delivered the Tuesday keynote speech where he was tasked to imagine the next 35 years in the game industry:

Then what do the games of 2043 look like? “I think you would call [them] ‘augmented reality’ but we don’t,” Sterling continued. “We think that reality is real — you can have a lot of fun with [an overlaid] game interface.” To Sterling, the games of the future scale from personal “body games” to global games and space games and everything in between — including “neighborhood games”.

Sterling wasn’t all flowers, he continued with a dark prophecy, which I totally agree with:

“Stagnation in the creative side of the industry will hamper their evolution.”

That’s exactly what augmented reality is missing today. The technology is reaching a good-enough stage; the buzz has been built to a more-than-reasonable level; and yet no augmented reality game has broken into the main stream: gameplay, fun, killer-app – you name it, but who’s got it?